libjava is a train wreck.

[Mike Stump]

On Jun 5, 2007, at 9:40 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
> Steve Kargl writes:
>> Can someone explain why libjava *must* commit binary files to the
>> repository?  A merge of trunk to the fortran-experiments branch
>> generated 70 conflicts that I need to resolve.  This is a complete
>> waste of time that would have been spent towards cutting a diff
>> of the branch against trunk for patch submission!
>
> In addition to David Daney's comments, I don't really understand why
> you've got conflicts on your branch.  You won't have changed anything
> in libjava/ there, so the problem shouldn't arise.

I agree.  I do lots of merges, including 4.2 merging and trunk merging  
that included all the recent binary files in libjava.  A conflict as  
you describe (barring the integration of the fortran runtime with the  
java runtime) means that you asked it to do something non-sensical, or  
some other fundamental problem.  You should seek to understand it, and  
then `fix' it.  I'd be happy to help you out.

The first step to tracking it down is to examine the end of the last  
merge and the start of the merge that produced the conflicts.  Either,  
they are the exact same string with a version number, or a tag that  
was unchanged, or, a diff between the two should yield the empty set.   
I'd check that first.  You can diff any file that conflicted that  
should not have to understand what went wrong.  The best file to do  
would be a ChangeLog file, as it is self-describing.